March 8, 2000

WORK OF BELOVED PAINTER RENÉ MAGRITTE REEXAMINED IN NEW SFMOMA EXHIBITION

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present the international exhibition Magritte from May 5 to September 5, 2000. Drawn from an exhibition organized by Steingrim Laursen, director of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, the San Francisco presentation -- which includes SFMOMA's recent acquisition, the great 1952 painting Les valeurs personnelles (Personal Values) -- is organized by SFMOMA's Janet Bishop, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture, and Gary Garrels, Elise S. Haas Chief Curator and curator of painting and sculpture. "Treating a variety of themes that recur in Magritte's work -- from the fracturing of perception and voyeurism to physical displacement and metamorphosis -- this exhibition brings the broad achievement of Magritte's work to the West Coast for the first time in more than thirty years," notes Bishop.

The SFMOMA presentation features approximately sixty-five works that examine the painter's signature style, beloved for its irony and unsettling psychological edge, against a more contemporary sensibility. Magritte considers the artist's work from a new angle, highlighting his investigation of painting as representation and the relationship between language and images, words and objects, rather than his links to Surrealism. The exhibition examines this popular and profoundly influential artist as a forerunner and source of inspiration for Pop and Conceptual art and considers his impact on 20th-century art.

A highlight of the exhibition is the pairing of two rarely shown paintings, La Chambre d'écout (The Listening Room), 1952, and L'Anniversaire (The Anniversary), 1959. Each of the similar paintings depicts a room with a window off to the left and an enormous object within: an apple and a rock, respectively. As Magritte once wrote, "I don't paint visions. To the best of my ability, by painterly means, I describe objects -- and the mutual relationships of objects -- in such a way that none of our habitual concepts or feelings is necessarily linked with them."

René Magritte (1898-1967) was born in Lessines, Belgium, where he first made paintings and took art lessons at the age of thirteen. It was around this time, in 1912, that Magritte's mother committed suicide, horrific event in the young artist's life. In 1916 he left high school to attend the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. With many other cultural institutions closed during the hostilities of the First World War, the Académie had become a haven for intellectuals; as a result, Magritte was able to associate with many of the city's artists, writers and musicians.

Magritte moved to Paris in 1927, when many avant-garde artists were gathering there, and he came to know André Breton, Max Ernst, Joan Miró and Hans Arp. This proved an artistically liberating time for Magritte, and he experienced what has been described as an artistic epiphany upon seeing Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical painting The Song of Love, 1914. "This triumphant poetry supplanted the stereotyped effect of traditional painting," wrote Magritte. "It represented a complete break with the mental habits peculiar to artists who are prisoners of talent, virtuosity and all the little aesthetic specialties. It was a new vision through which the spectator might recognize his own isolation and hear the silence of the world." Inspired to combine objects from the real world in compositions that seemed credible, if not necessarily logical, the artist began to juxtapose incongruous objects, presenting amusing, if sometimes oddly disturbing, scenarios from his imagination. The artist enjoyed overturning conventions. In what may be Magritte's best-known painting and a highlight of this exhibition, The Treachery of Images, 1929, the artist depicts a pipe next to the caption Ceci n'est pas une pipe ("This is not a pipe").

In a room adjacent to the exhibition galleries, the SFMOMA Education Department will present a reading and study area featuring new materials developed by the department's interactive multimedia team.

In addition, a number of related public programs will be presented. In conjunction with the exhibition, SFMOMA will publish Magritte, a 112-page, fully illustrated exhibition catalogue containing an essay by Siegfried Gohr, an art scholar and professor of art theory at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe, Germany. The catalogue will be available for $24.95 in the SFMOMA MuseumStore.


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